That's a lot of bicycles

The Greenway doesn't allow bikes, yet 6 lanes of traffic are a-ok? That doesn't make any sense.

Are you sure that Bikes are prohibited on the Greenway? I thought that state law says that bikes can only be banned on limited access highways.

I was told by a longtime advocate that when they were planning the Greenway, the former Boston Bike Czar was a Vehicular Cyclist - someone who believes that all bikers have a 25 year old guy's tolerance for risk and strenuous activity, and that the solution for bikes was always for people to ride bikes in traffic, acting like "vehicles" at all times.
What my source said was that this ex-czar actively discouraged greenway planners from including separated bike paths from the planted center median on the theory that people would prefer to ride in the three lanes of fast moving traffic on either side, mixing with freeway on and off ramp traffic.

I ride it occasionally, and it takes a lot of confidence, and it's not going to happen very often. My prediction is that 99% of tourists and 80% of locals will just ride slowly down the greenway paths.
If that isn't tenable and people start complaining, my hope is that they will either provide separated bike paths on the greenway, or a dedicated bike space on the road. I know that it's something that Boston Bikes is trying to work on.

The street part of the roadway is badly under-capacity except at rush hour, which is why people race down it hoping to beat the lights.

They have rebalancing trucks which move excess capacity from one are to another. I think that it's going to take a bit of time for them to develop data on trends ( for example is the net flow from N station to S. station in the AM or vice versa? ) The stations have sensors and have realtime feedback to the network to tell where the bikes are. I downloaded the app this morning and it led me to a nearby station, where there was one bike (as the app predicted).

Around noon there was one bike parked at the station at Hanover St. I stopped to look over the information and saw that the lone bike had a placard with an "8" on it, like the ones in the photo. 90 minutes later, nearly all stalls were occupied.

Curiously, I was walking down Cambridge St. to get on the T. I saw a pack of bicyclists at Stanford St. I didn't know if that was a bike tour, or a bunch of the shared bikes. When the light changed, all 15-20 of them proceeded to ride the wrong way up Temple St.

The for- profit system that runs the Velib' in exchange for the ad rights on the stations and bikes was in the process of re-negotiating the contract and did a lot of PR about how they were losing bikes in an attempt to get concessions from the city.

http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/02/12/reports-of-v...

These programs have been very successful and are expanding in Minneapolis, Washington DC, Barcelona, Montreal and London. There's a small system in Denver which seems to be a bit of shrug.
I think that these can be a huge driver of demand for better facilities. Notably Paris didn't have much in the way of infrastructure when Velib began, but it's been dramatically improved in the four years that the program has been running so far.

If the comments thusfar are your idea of "bitching", grow some thicker skin.

Also, who said Universal Hub = "cycling community"?

to the local cycling community than you probably are, I'd say the reaction has generally been very favorable. Cyclists usually support anything that gets more bikes on to the road. This should do so.

Such riders ought to be ticketed, but as with jaywalking, speeding, etc., most users of roadway and sidewalk in Boston get away with rules violations. It's easy to point fingers at one segment, but the truth is that pedestrians/cyclists/drivers all flout the rules with impunity because enforcement is not a high priority for BPD.